Does Elizabeth May value mother earth over human lives? Benefits of pipelines outweigh the risks

Elizabeth May is at it again - first she blamed the wildfires in Fort McMurray on climate change and now she’s saying that shipping solid bitumen via railway is the safest way to transport the product.

But she’s wrong and the numbers tell the story when it comes to safe arrival of petroleum products in the context of shipping via rail versus pipelines. The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association reports an effectiveness of 99.999% when hydrocarbons are delivered using this method, while the Railway Association of Canada reports a 99.9977% safeness.

That might seem like a very small percentage difference, but it actually amounts to 15.6 million barrels of oil safely delivered out of the 1.2 billion that are transported in Canada per year.

Trains also transport far less oil than pipelines do and stats from a report completed for the Railway Association of Canada show that 95% of hydrocarbons are transported by pipelines. So in the context of numbers, rail transport is far more dangerous than that of a pipeline – less product is delivered with more incidents.

There are risk factors associated with everything in life – whether it’s walking out your front door every day, or transporting hydrocarbons through a pipeline. There are no doubts that pipelines are associated with certain risks, but when it comes to moving our oil resources, the benefits of pipelines outweigh the risks.

Comments

It really must be a slow, slow news day when anybody deems Dizzy Lizzy worthy of a comment on any issue… She has proven time and time again that she pulls her “facts” out of thin air, which on Saltspring Island evidently contains a lot of cannabis fumes given her predilection to get it wrong very time… And I’m still waiting to see those fleets of electric driven cars that she previously claimed dominate on Vancouver Island…. So, wrong agin, but what else can expect from her?

Lizzy and the whole green/climate cult are just the modern version of Malthusian misanthropy.

“Neo-Malthusianism” may be used as a label for those who are concerned that overpopulation may increase resource depletion or environmental degradation to a degree that is not sustainable with the potential of ecological collapse or other hazards [climate catastrophe]. The term is also often immediately connected with bureaucratic tyranny and state sponsored eugenics and forced austerity.

It’s a form of anti-humanitarianism sold with virtue posing and fraudulant narratives

The only way to make crude-by-rail safer is to transport it in double-hulled, hell-for-strong tanks specifically designed for dangerous commodities, like those presently used for LPG. Also, the trains would need a completely new type of braking system that actuates every brake on the train simultaneously, instead of front to back. And that will never happen because the cost would be astronomical, for something that could suddenly be made redundant by the construction of pipelines.

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